Crimea: Catholic priest latest fined for failing to use full name.
Yalta's Catholic priest, Fr Tomasz Wytrwal, was fined one month's average wage on 5 August for his parish's failure to use its full official name on material it had produced. Under a Russian Supreme Court decision, only organisations, not individuals, can be subject to such punishments. His is one of nine cases against religious communities so far in 2022. The warning to Simferopol's Orthodox Jewish community followed an inspection by the FSB security service's Service for the Defence of the Constitutional Order and the Struggle Against Terrorism.
The Catholic priest of the southern coastal town of Yalta in Russian-occupied Crimea was fined about one month's average local wage on 5 August for his parish's failure to use its full official legal name on material it had produced. The fine came despite a 2017 Russian Supreme Court decision that only organisations, not individuals can be prosecuted under this provision of Russia's "anti-missionary" laws.
A Magistrate's Court in Yalta handed down the fine - of 30,000 Russian Roubles – on Catholic priest Fr Tomasz Wytrwal. A Dominican friar originally from Poland, he is priest at the town's Immaculate Conception Church, which is part of the Pastoral District of Crimea and Sevastopol which the Catholic Church had to set up in 2015 after the Russian annexation.
An official of Yalta's Prosecutor's Office declined to discuss why the administrative case had been brought against Fr Wytrwal when cases can be brought only against organisations. She also declined to discuss another case against a Pentecostal Church in the nearby town of Alupka. "You have to come in in person," she told Forum 18 (see below).
Fr Wytrwal's is one of nine cases against religious communities which failed to display their full official legal name on internet postings, on literature or outside the place where they meet for worship which are known to have reached Magistrate's Courts in Russian-occupied Crimea between January and late August 2022.
Source: forum18 org.
Photo by wikivoyage.org